At the beginning of November I moved to a new webhost. (site5, since you asked, and we’re very happy together, thanks) I was so anxious to get away from Yahoo webhosting and move on with my life that I skipped a pretty important step. I won’t go into great detail here about the very tecnical aspects of the problem, but, well… ok, fine. I didn’t back up my db. If you know what I’m talking about then you know I’m an idiot, and if you don’t, you probably suspected.
Anyway, I was checking my visitor log today, and clicked on a google search that brought someone to my page. Lo and behold, there was one of my old posts, cached on Google! (The search that started this all, oddly, was a Google India search on “Terry Gross is Jewish“) I pulled up the source code, copied the pertinent data into WordPress, changed the date and presto, my post was back. I started to wonder how many of my old posts I could find on Google, and thus began a quest of hours. At this point I have resurrected 57 posts from January and April – July. I’m not sure exactly why I couldn’t find anything from February, March, or August – September. I guess I’d need a better understanding of how Google works, how long they save this information, what their criteria are, etc.
Most of the old links work (even to the pictures), though some of the stuff, like the hit counter on links, is a little wonky. Also, all of my comments are gone. I could have saved a few of them, but that would’ve been a much, much bigger pain in the ass.